Like Hogtown, Montreal has produced - or perhaps gathered up is a better description - a cornucopia of fine writers: poets Émile Nelligan and Irving Layton; novelists Mordecai Richler and Rawi Hage; playwright Michel Tremblay; and provocateur, memoirist and poet/translator John Glassco to name just some. But the greatest of all was Mavis Gallant. Her short fictions of displacement, of not fitting in, of disillusionment and frustration put her work even beyond the best efforts of a Richler, a Layton, a Tremblay.
Mavis Gallant died yesterday in Paris where she'd lived for 60 years after leaving the now defunct Montreal Standard to write fiction. She was 91 and had been in poor health for some years so her death was hardly unexpected. Nevertheless, I was still shocked when I came across the news on a CBC website. That's because Mavis Gallant was my real introduction to CanLit. Most CanLit I'd read were stories and novels of the high school assigned-reading variety. They were Worthy and Important but, I dunno, they just didn't turn my crank so I went back to favourites such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh. Then, remaindered in a long gone chain bookstore on Yonge Street, I came across a Mavis Gallant collection. I forget which of her books I read first - Home Truths? From the Fifteenth District? The Pegnitz Junction? - but from the moment I picked it up I was hooked. The only Mavis Gallant book I haven't been able to finish is A Fairly Good Time, a novel published in 1970, which I found at a yard sale years after I'd read her short stories and by then been thoroughly spoiled.
Mavis Gallant's work will be read and remembered for a long, long time. To honour her work - and for demonstrating that a Canadian author doesn't have to live here and make the right noises to keep the grants and teaching gigs coming in, or even write about Canadians - some publisher or cultural agency should establish the Mavis Gallant short fiction prize for lifetime achievement. Better still: how about the Mavis Gallant-Norman Levine short fiction prize for lifetime achievement? Submissions by exiles would be positively encouraged.
Mavis Gallant died yesterday in Paris where she'd lived for 60 years after leaving the now defunct Montreal Standard to write fiction. She was 91 and had been in poor health for some years so her death was hardly unexpected. Nevertheless, I was still shocked when I came across the news on a CBC website. That's because Mavis Gallant was my real introduction to CanLit. Most CanLit I'd read were stories and novels of the high school assigned-reading variety. They were Worthy and Important but, I dunno, they just didn't turn my crank so I went back to favourites such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh. Then, remaindered in a long gone chain bookstore on Yonge Street, I came across a Mavis Gallant collection. I forget which of her books I read first - Home Truths? From the Fifteenth District? The Pegnitz Junction? - but from the moment I picked it up I was hooked. The only Mavis Gallant book I haven't been able to finish is A Fairly Good Time, a novel published in 1970, which I found at a yard sale years after I'd read her short stories and by then been thoroughly spoiled.
Mavis Gallant's work will be read and remembered for a long, long time. To honour her work - and for demonstrating that a Canadian author doesn't have to live here and make the right noises to keep the grants and teaching gigs coming in, or even write about Canadians - some publisher or cultural agency should establish the Mavis Gallant short fiction prize for lifetime achievement. Better still: how about the Mavis Gallant-Norman Levine short fiction prize for lifetime achievement? Submissions by exiles would be positively encouraged.
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